Party and Government is an eleven-country study of the relationship between the governments of liberal democracies, mainly from Western Europe, but also including the United States and India, and the parties which support these governments. It examines this relationship at the three levels at which governments and parties connect: appointments, policy-making, and patronage. The emphasis is on a two-way relationship: parties influence governments but governments also influence parties. The extent and the direction of this influence varies from country to country. In some cases, governments and parties are almost autonomous from each other, as in the United States; in other cases, on the contrary, there is considerable power of one over the other: sometimes the party dominates, sometimes the government.

Product Description: Over the last two decades, the process of European integration has become interwoven with the theme of citizenship and the debate on the democratic quality of the EU and of its institutions has become more salient. What are the views about Europe which emerge when we interrogate the national elites of the four large South European countries, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and what is their vision of a supra-national citizenship in its different facets? Are these views sufficiently homogeneous and do they distinguish themselves from those of the rest of the European Union to the point of enabling us to talk about a "distinctive region of Europe"? Which interpretation(s) of European citizenship emerges from a systematic exploration of these opinions? Using a set of survey and textual data collected in the framework of the IntUne project, the authors attempt to provide some original answers to these questions...read more

Product Description: Democratic Representation in Europe: Diversity, Change and Convergence explores representation as a core element of democracies in the modern era. Over the past 150 years parliamentary representation has developed into a main link between polity and society, and parliamentary representatives have come to form the nucleus of political elites...read more

Addresses a number of themes, paradoxes and problems inherent to Italian politics, and considers the relationship between the Italian domestic system and the international system.

Product Description: This book brings together leading scholars in the field of electoral studies and political representation to examine the democratization of the recruitment of political representatives in Western Europe. The study deals with long-term changes in parliamentary recruitment and patterns of political careers in eleven European countries from the middle of the 19th century until 2000...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Nature of Party Government examines relationships between governments and supporting parties on a comparative European basis. The book does so at the level of principles: there is a major conflict between governments, which should govern, and parties, which being representative, wish to shape the way governments operate...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)